3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item The role of Rap/Hip Hop music in the meaning and maintenance of identity in South African youth.(2009-03-06T05:50:54Z) Cohen, DrorAlthough music has seemingly always formed an integral part of human culture, technological advances in contemporary society have increased both its accessibility and portability, allowing for unprecedented production and consumption of a medium that allows individuals to enact and display various social identities during day-to-day life. Furthermore, recent research has demonstrated that youth consume more music that any other age group. Thus music may be considered as a primary cultural influence in the lives of youth. While the bulk of the research conducted in understanding the form and function of this influence has been located in the disciplines of sociology and musicology, Psychologists in Europe and America have become increasingly interested in understanding the role of music in constructing and maintaining identity during this critical period of development. As a contribution to this field of application outside of these contexts and located within a qualitative framework, this study explored the role of Rap/Hip Hop music, as one of the most popular global and local genres of music, in the meaning and maintenance of identity in a cohort of South African youth. The resultant thematic framework illustrated the complex tensions negotiated by youth through assuming Hip Hop culture membership in South Africa. Importantly, the study showed that the nature of Hip Hop culture; its emphasis on self-expression, individuation and critical social awareness dovetails with many of the traditional psychological developmental theories of youth identity. Hip Hop consumption also implied appropriating identity markers from a wide range of social influences, posing challenges to the application of traditional social identity theory in accounting for in and out groupings. This was most pronounced in the way that ‘remixing’, as a governing musical principle in Hip Hop seems to resonate as key mode of identity and identification amongst its South African consumers. Thus, it seems fitting that South African youth currently in the midst of cultural, economic and political transitions would embrace an eclectic rather than rigidly bounded genre of music with such enthusiasm. In some ways then Hip Hop in South Africa, appears to provide youth with the means to remix past and present, old and new, global and local, self and other.Item Students' responses to the insertion of popular culture into an English literature curriculum: A Rwandan case study(2007-04-10T11:41:59Z) Nyirahuku, BellaThe research report explores a pedagogic and curricular intervention in the English curriculum of third year pre-service education students at the National University of Rwanda. It uses as an implementation instance the Bana Molokai subculture as a means of relating the teaching of English literature to cultural practices found in the students’ living space which are semiotically more diverse than the traditional literary-linguistic forms. My research attempts to establish whether and how the pedagogical intervention of teaching cultural artefacts produced by the Bana Molokai can enrich the learning/teaching of literature in this context. At a secondary level, the introduction of the Bana Molokai youth culture phenomenon into a literature classroom calls attention to the presence of the youth culture phenomenon on the continent as an emerging site for the articulation of the contemporary interests and needs of African youth. Therefore, although the pedagogical intervention forms the major component of this Research project, it incorporates a preliminary phase: an overview of the Bana Molokai subculture as an illustration of the vitality of texts from the field of popular culture on the African continent. The study uses an analysis of students’ responses before and after the pedagogical intervention as a means of providing comparative evidence of students’ perceptions of existing literary practices in their context in the light of the expansion. In effect, it uses in the first instance emerging thematic points in the students’ responses in order to understand their perception of literary practices as a preliminary justification of an interventionist expansion in Rwanda. In the second instance, it uses emerging thematic points in the students’ responses to the pedagogical intervention to unravel how the lesson of teaching Bana Molokai has related them to the exercise of learning/teaching literature in their context. The analysis furthermore attempts to indicate the comparative benefits of teaching Bana Molokai texts in Rwanda in regards to the established literary canon.